Approaches are being developed to enable an individual to make payments using his or her mobile phone, either at a Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminal or on the Web. This will potentially preclude individuals from needing to carry around cash or equivalents such as credit and debit cards. Such approaches include vendors storing customers' credit card and bank account information, and allowing users to select a stored payment option when a payment is required. However, in such approaches, PoS terminals may require specialized hardware and software that recognizes the payment protocol, and these approaches do not include awareness of a customer's social network, nor do they provide support for friends or participants in a customer's social network to assist in payment of a real-time transaction.
Accordingly, a need exists to provide a mechanism and/or system that allow a mobile device owner to elicit payment contributions from other individuals, using virtual social network connections, to contribute to a real-time mobile-assisted payment.